It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English. This is to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed. One might almost say that their vices are the flower of their virtues.

Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of dragging all things
into the light. The avarice of their peasants means the independence of their peasants.
What the English call their rudeness in the streets is a phase of their social equality. The
worried look of their women is connected with the responsibility of their women; and a
certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture in the men is related to their
inexhaustible and extraordinary military courage. Of all countries, therefore, France is the
worst country for a superficial fool to admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves it he
will soon be a knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that are not
creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He will admire the grace and
indolence of the most industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and
fantasy of the most determinedly respectable and common-place people in the world. This
mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he
makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself.
An Englishman who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at home in
a French modern theatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French
caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring
something he does not understand. He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up
where he has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the
tree. He is trying to pluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilled
the rude but rich soil of French virtue.

The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round. Suppose a
Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England, where the shadow of the
great houses still falls everywhere, and where even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic.
If the Frenchman saw our aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it,
if he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know that we should
feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive little gnat. He would be imitating
English aristocracy; he would be imitating the English vice. But he would not even
understand the vice he plagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is
partly a virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English which balance
snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the English, their hospitality, their
unconscious poetry, their sentimental conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The
French Royalist sees that the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it
is base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless King. The impotence
of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English loyal subject almost to the chivalry
and dignity of a Jacobite. The Frenchman sees that the English servant is respectful: he
does not realise that he is also disrespectful; that there is an English legend of the
humorous and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as his master; the Caleb
Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the English do admire a nobleman; he does
not allow for the fact that they admire a nobleman most when he does not behave like one.
They like a noble to be unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the master
must not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to enjoy it; and among the joys
they desire in him there is none which they desire more sincerely than that of generosity,
of throwing money about among mankind, or, to use the noble mediaeval word, largesse -
the joy of largeness. That is why a cabman tells you you are no gentleman if you give him
his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is hurt. You have wounded his ideal.
You have defaced his vision of the perfect aristocrat. All this is really very subtle and
elusive; it is very difficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort of
vicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchman could easily grasp it at
all. He would think it was mere slavishness; and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So
every Englishman must (at first) feel French candour to be mere brutality. And if he likes
it, he is a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. It requires long years of plentitude and quiet, the slow growth of great parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through many centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit of English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify the terrible flower of French indecency.

When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of mine to an
extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays, each occupying about twenty
minutes. They were all astonishingly effective; but there was one of them which was so
effective that my friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by
the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a wreck or naval
disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they fight each other without object
and in a mere hatred of everything. And then there was added, with all that horrible irony
which Voltaire began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their
bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal embrace. My friend
and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived long in Paris, he said, like a Frenchman:
"What admirable artistic arrangement! Is it not exquisite?" "No," I replied, assuming as far
as possible the traditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in Punch - "No, it is not
exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is unmeaning I do not mind. But if it has a
meaning I know what the meaning is; it is that under all their pageant of chivalry men are
not only beasts, but even hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity, especially when
humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human soul, and
when it is meant to depress it. I know that Cyrano de Bergerac (where the actors talked
even quicker) was meant to encourage man. And I know that this was meant to
discourage him." "These sentimental and moral views of art," began my friend, but I broke
into his words as a light broke into my mind. "Let me say to you," I said, "what Jaurès said
to Liebknecht at the Socialist Conference: 'You have not died on the barricades.' You are
an Englishman, as I am, and you ought to be as amiable as I am. These people have
some right to be terrible in art, for they have been terrible in politics. They may endure
mock tortures on the stage; they have seen real tortures in the streets. They have been
hurt for the idea of Democracy. They have been hurt for the idea of Catholicism. It is not
so utterly unnatural to them that they should be hurt for the idea of literature. But, by
blazes, it is altogether unnatural to me! And the worst thing of all is that I, who am an
Englishman, loving comfort, should find comfort in such things as this. The French do not
seek comfort here, but rather unrest. This restless people seeks to keep itself in a
perpetual agony of the revolutionary mood. Frenchmen, seeking revolution, may find the
humiliation of humanity inspiring. But God forbid that two pleasure-seeking Englishmen
should ever find it pleasant!"